500 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
fi lmgoers’ notions of what a horror fi lm score should sound like and has been
one of the most infl uential soundtracks of all time.
The 1960s and early 1970s saw the demise of the golden-age fi lm score, as
Holly wood composers turned to jazz and other popular styles in addition to a
more dissonant, modernist idiom. Notable jazz scores included Duke Elling-
ton’s for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Quincy Jones’s for In Cold Blood (1967).
Characteristic of this more economical aesthetic is Argentinean American
composer Lalo Schifrin’s music for Cool Hand Luke (1967), much of which is played
by a small bluegrass-style ensemble featuring acoustic guitar and banjo. The most
familiar example of Shifrin’s jazz-infl uenced music is his theme for the television
series Mission: Impossible, which ran from 1966 to 1973.
Some fi lms went so far as to limit themselves to diegetic music. The Last Pic-
ture Show (1971), set in small-town Texas in the early 1950s, uses only country and
popular songs by Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and others, which the characters
listen to on jukeboxes, car radios, and the like. The music in Five Easy Pieces (1970),
in which Jack Nicholson portrays a concert pianist alienated from his musical
family, consists only of piano pieces by Bach, Mozart, and Chopin played by
characters onscreen and the Tammy Wynette records that fascinate Nicholson’s
unrefi ned waitress girlfriend.JOHN WILLIAMS: A RETURN TO THE GOLDEN AGE
A major pendulum swing occurred in the mid-1970s with the fi lm scores of John
Williams. An established fi lm composer and Oscar-winner for his music for
Stephen Spielberg’s horror thriller Jaws, Williams drew on his enormous stylis-
tic range to create an entirely different kind of soundtrack for the fi rst of George
Lucas’s Star Wars movies in 1977. For that fi lm, which evoked the nonstop adventure
of 1930s movie serials featuring science fi ction heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gor-
don, Williams paid homage to the golden-age scores of Erich Korngold and Max
Steiner. In the context of mid-1970s Holly wood scoring practices, audiences could
detect a tone of affectionate parody in Star Wars’
lush orchestration, romantic harmony, nearly
continuous underscoring, occasional mickey-
mousing, and memorable leitmotifs.
The popularity of Williams’s music for Star
Wars and other action-adventure fi lms of the next
decade, including the Superman and Indiana Jones
movies, soon made the grandiose golden-age
orchestral score the default sound of cinematic
fantasy, science fi ction, and adventure—often
without the irony of using such music for stories
set in the present or future.
In the meantime, a countervailing trend
in fi lm scoring placed ever greater emphasis
on using movies to launch hit songs. Although
movie musicals and the popular music indus-
try had worked in tandem since the beginning
of sound fi lm, a postwar phenomenon was the
hit single that gained popularity through its usejazz fi lm scoresall-diegetic scoresK C-3PO, the protocol
droid from Star Wars,
rehearses the Boston Pops
under the watchful eye of
composer and conductor
John Williams.172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 500 23/01/13 11:15 AM